Radical political change is usually a carrot-and-stick affair. You have one group of radicals which is organized and peaceful (the public face of a movement) and another group of radicals which is secret, violent, and (wink-wink-nudge-nudge) totally unconnected to the legitimate resistance.

(the violent faction is sometimes highly organized, but at other times it’s just the potential threat of a spontaneous armed mob)

The goal is to make the The Powers That Be (TPTB) realize that, “If we don’t negotiate with the nonviolent people, we’ll have to deal with those maniacs over there!”

Here’s the paradox: sometimes this carrot-and-stick approach divides-and-conquers the TPTB, but other times it divides-and-conquers the radicals!

So what the tactical fuck.

In the first scenario, some elites continue to say, “Fuck it, let’s just crush them by force,”, but they get yelled at by OTHER elites, who respond, “Yeah we COULD just crush the radicals by force, but then our businesses would wind up burned to the ground, and as much as we love bigotry, we love money more!” And as the elites fall to arguing among themselves, the radicals win.

But other times, the radicals wind up fighting with each other over whether violence is counter-productive, and TPTB use a mixture of agents provocateurs and media propaganda to encourage this infighting, cutting the small armed factions off from their large-but-moderate base, and disabling the movement.

EXAMPLES: Japan and Italy in the 60s, USA commie-bombers in the 70s, German commie-bombers in the 80s.

Antifa people love to point to Germany in 1938, more so than Germany in the 70s/80s (when the German Red Army Faction was bombing people for decades, but achieved exactly zero results, despite being much more militant and heavily armed than Antifa)

The point being, all successful instances of radical change have some violent component – even if the violent component is just the potential for a mass uprising of previously apolitical poors. So it’s not a question of ‘VIOLENCE vs NONVIOLENCE’ – it’s a question of, WHAT OTHER VARIABLES ARE WE MISSING?

What, in other words, is the common point of all the successful movements (when the ‘if we don’t deal with Martin we’ll have to deal with Malcolm’ question caused TPTB to divide against each other), and what’s the common point of all the failed movements (when the violence issue caused the radicals to divide against each other)?

I don’t have an answer to this. I certainly don’t have a good list of examples of successful/failed revolutionary movements to analyze. I don’t even own a dang rattan chair. I’m just saying that’s a better way to look at it, rather than endless, circular “is punching nazis good or bad” debates.